Comedian and talk show host Bill Maher is unorthodox on the left, although he is on the left, and sometimes that results moments of clarity that make his fellow Democrats livid and draw scattered cheers from non-Democrats. It happened last week on the topic of "concentration camps," and it happened on Friday night's show when he brought up 2020 candidate Julian Castro during his monologue for HBO's "Real Time".

In it, he challenged more than one sacred cow on the left, including abortion and transgender identity. That's on top of the mere heresy of challenging one of the few, proud, 2400 Democrats running to defeat Trump next year.

"Julián Castro won the 'Woke Olympics' on the first night when he said, 'Trans females should have the right to an abortion.' I agree. Now if only they had a uterus," said Maher, with the crowd laughing along.

"Try selling that in the red states," he said. In a mocking tone he outlined the position, "'If a man identifies as a woman, then we stand with her right not only to imagine that she's pregnant, but to terminate that pregnancy, which is not possible.'"

It may seem obvious to say the pregnancy would be imaginary, but that deference to reality is almost always taken and treated as an attack on transgender issues, where immutable physical and biological truths are not only ignored, but considered hate speech.

On Thursday, Castro clarified in a tweet that while he said "trans female" he actually meant to say "trans men, trans masculine, and non-binary folks" that need federally funded abortions. That type of error, too, is normally treated as hate speech by the militant LGBTQ activist community. The "Twitter mob", as Maher so accurately characterized them.

"They were going nuts that first night," said Maher in his monologue. "They were trying to out-Spanish each other."

He had some great jokes about almost all of the candidates, all of whom richly deserved them after the spectacle Americans witnessed on Wednesday and Thursday.